Introduction
I think the imagery throughout the Voynich manuscript is entirely too pagan to come from any sect rooted in Judeo-Christian belief. However, the theory explored in this post is worth considering for several reasons.
First, one woman does hold up a cross.
Second, the Adamites may have blended their doctrine with the native folk traditions of the area, picking up reflections of Frau Holle. It looks to me like just the opposite may have been the case. Some Adamites or Hussites may have joined in on the pagan ritual depicted in the Voynich. Hence, the cross.
Third, the cave depicted in the Voynich could as easily be Chynov as Ruskeala, for it has the same sort of reticulated roofs and green water, and Chynov would have been a prime candidate as refuge for the Adamites when the Hussites swept through Tabor to clean house.
Fourth, many of the women are nude, which is in keeping with what we know about the Adamites.
Fifth, the Uralic undertone in Voynichese could be explained as a dialect of Hungarian. This is the thinnest point, for while certainly Finnic, Voynichese bears little resemblance to Hungarian constructions but rather reveals a very strong vein of Old Norse along with the Finnic.
Sixth, the rosette map depicts the castles leading up to Prague. That's nearly a no-brainer for anyone taking the time to study it. More about this is on the post titled
If nothing else, it is worth noting that the stage in northeastern Europe during the 15th century had far more players than the Holy Roman Empire or major sects such as the Hussites.
The Adamites
The Adamites resurfaced in Bohemia in the 15th century, during the time when the Voynich manuscript was written.
Let's set the stage with an intro to the Hussites. The Hussites were the Rebel Alliance in the early 1400s against their enemy, The Holy Roman Empire. The Hussite revolt against the Roman Catholic Church in 1418 attracted heretics from far and wide. Among the most interesting by far were the Adamites.
The Adamites were a well known North African cult in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Centuries, devoted to regaining the innocence of pre-Fall Adam. Their main expression of (or motivation behind) this rediscovered ‘liberty’ was to practice ‘holy nudism’- both in every day life, and in public worship. They tended to meet underground, and referred to their services as ‘Paradise’. Their favourite Bible moment was, unsurprisingly, David’s undignified dancing in his pants at the return of the ark in 2 Samuel 6.
Despite being condemned as heretics by the likes of Augustine, the Adamites saw something of a revival in 15th Century Bohemia with a sect of Taborites who ‘indulged in predatory forays upon the neighborhood, and… committed wild excesses in nocturnal dances.’
The main teaching of this sect was that God is all that exists. Private property is blasphemy, on the other hand all that is common property is sacred. Therefore women should be common too. The mass consisted of stripping naked, dancing around a fire and concluding in an all-out orgy. They themselves were the sons of God, Jesus a misguided distant relative (for he died, unlike what they expected of themselves). They began their prayers: “Oh Lord who art in us…”.
The pious Hussites couldn’t tolerate such wickedry in their new (Biblically inspired) town of Tabor in Southern Bohemia. After a few months of the founding of the city, the Adamites were expelled. The sect set up shop only a few hours away. They began to raid villages in their vicinity, murdering peasants who were but lesser beings in their eyes as was everybody else. So the Tabor Hussites send a field army to destroy each of their new camps. Finally, they are cornered into a river island where they fight to the last. Against the armoured soldiers of Tabor stand by now only a small group (cca 40) of naked men, women and children. They fight so fiercely that the enemy general is killed, but in the end the Adamites stand no chance. Those who are not killed in the fighting are burnt at stake.
Or that is at least how the story goes according to the chroniclers of the time. History is written by the victors (or in this case those who were defeated later) and so all our sources come from moderate Taborite Hussites, who detested a sect that disregarded church hierarchy of any kind (be their Papal or Hussite); was flirting with communal ownership and instead empowered the disenfranchised proletariat to not only interpret the religious teachings themselves, but also to abolish taxation of any kind.
But we no longer speak of Adamites, but of Chilialists who were relatively wide-spread in Southern Bohemia in the earlier years and expected the world to end and in its stead Jesus’ thousand year reign to be imminent. So it is quite possible that there never were any proper “Adamites” (as a group) per se. Instead we have a proto-anarcho syndicalist, extremely pious and to a great extent anachronistic religious sect only labeled “Adamites” by their enemies.
The Adamites - Sex Crazed Medieval Maniacs In Southern Bohemia?
CHÝNOV CAVE
The Chýnov Cave is located 3 km north-east of the small town Chýnov (10 km east of the town Tábor). It is one of the biggest caves and the first declassified one in the Czech Republic.
Chýnov Cave - dragon
The limestone cave was discovered in 1863. It arose by the power of the water in the southern hillside of Pacova Hora (Pacov's Mount).
There is an underground system of small lakes in the cave with different depths - maximal is 37 m. The small stream runs through the lowest part. In the 1980's the big cave, about 100 m long and 30 m high, was found below the water level. The depth of discovered spaces grew up to 81 m. The length of discovered tunnels is about 1200 m, but just 220 m is accessible to the public.
A lot of interesting formations were created by water and various colours of marble, such as white, yellow and brown can be found on the walls of the cave. The typical stalactite and stalagmite formations for these kinds of caves are not found here.
Divergence of Finnish and Hungarian
The diaspora of the Uralic language family has led to geographic isolation between members. In fact, there is a clear pattern in this language family between distance and language divergence. One of the most obvious examples of this drastic divergence is the relationship between Finnish and Hungarian. These two major branches split approximately 4,500 years ago, compared with Germanic languages, whose divergence commenced an estimated 2,000 years ago.
Dr. Gyula Weöres, a lecturer at the University of Helsinki in the early twentieth century, published several books about Uralic linguistics. In Finland-Hungary Album (Suomi-Unkari Albumi), Dr. Weöres explains that there are nine independent Uralic languages that form a "language chain" from the Danube valley to the coast of Finland. Hungarian and Finnish exist on the polar opposite ends of this language chain. Hungarian is even more isolated due to its people's history of conquering while traveling across Europe toward Hungary. Excluding Hungarian, the Uralic languages form two geographically continuous language chains along major waterways.
Coupling this vast geographic distance with several thousand years of independent development and vastly differing history, the extent of the language diversion between Finnish and Hungarian is not surprising.
http://geography.about.com/od/culturalgeography/a/Hungarian-And-Finnish.htm
Conclusion
For one blaring indication that this is not at all a tight fit as a theory, one need only look again at the star charts with the women in the center. To my knowledge, nothing in the Adamites' beliefs would make for placing the faces of women in the centers of the star charts. As per the theory that this is a pagan text from a Norse/Germanic tradition that predates Odin/Thor, etc., those women are the
disir, female ancestors of various nordic clans. Really, nothing else explains them. Nor does this Adamite theory explain why all the women and very few men depicted. So I still believe that the origin is more Kven than Bohemian, despite the fact that the castles correlate to those closer to Prague. Best guess is that this is a map for a pilgrimage down to Bohemia led by a woman or women from the north. The cult of Hulda resided throughout the countryside from the Alps all the way up to northern Norway, and from the Black Sea all the way west to the British Isles. The headdresses these women wear tell us plainly that they gathered from different areas in Europe. It's quite possible that we are looking at precisely what the Church endeavored to wipe from the face of the earth throughout the 11th to the 18th century.
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